More than five hundred people will participate in a global event to read the roughly fifty works by Russian author Anton Chekhov, reports Russia Beyond the Headlines. On September 25th, venues around the world will begin an online broadcast lasting 24 hours.

Lidia Yuknavitch discusses her latest book, The Small Backs of Children, war, art, the chaos of experience, and that photograph of the vulture stalking the dying child in the Sudan that won the Pulitzer Prize. ...more

Earlier today, the United States Attorney General charged 14 FIFA officials with 47 counts of corruption, racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. FIFA is the international association that oversees football (soccer), including the World Cup.

Writer Josh Weil talks about his novel, The Great Glass Sea, magical realism vs. science fiction, Russia’s experiments with mirrored satellites, his early days as an aspiring playwright, and how he uses fear as a fuel to accomplish his work. ...more

In addition to boasting one of the most beautiful subway systems in the world, Moscow commuters now stand to become the best-read. Per the Guardian, over 100 titles from authors including Pushkin, Chekhov, and Tolstoy are now available for download, simply by scanning a QR code in the station.

Then, Matthew Daddona reviews Carl Adamshick’s “empathetic” collection, Saint Friend. The poet employs a “smooth and elegiac rhetoric that is more concerned with sonic repetition than it is flawless consistency.” Adamshick’s book is worth a look for its “flair,” its “speed,” and its willingness to experiment with form.

In Koktebel, on the southern coast of Crimea, artists have gathered for almost a century, attracted to the “particular light and kinetic landscapes.” Now, with the annexation of Crimea, Neil Macfarquhar of the New York Times reports that the summer writer’s colony is divided, and the otherwise communal atmosphere has given way to two competing factions: the pro-Russian Crimea and the anti-Russia Crimea.

More people were reading Tolstoy than any other author in translation at the beginning of the 20th century, but as late as the 1880s, few non-Russians had even heard of him. Translators were deterred partly because of the length of his works and complexities of language, not to mention his overwhelming Russian-ness.

In the wake of American spies tapping into every form of electronic communication, Germany is considering typewriters for highly sensitive documents. The Russians have already instituted such measures. Typewriters aren’t foolproof though. In 1984, the Soviets listened to the keystrokes of US Embassy secretaries, looking for patterns.

Here’s some news out of Russia that isn’t related the Olympics: Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, who were recently released from prison, are no longer members of Pussy Riot, and it doesn’t look like the split was 100 percent amicable.

It’s a definite must-read in which Phillips deftly chronicles the simultaneous beauty and horror of half-wild dogs, a rainbow of Russian curses, the “mat of intimacies and betrayals” between contestants, and of course, the endless, unbelievable cold of the tundra.

It has nothing to do with the biography, actually. It’s about Russian translations of The Catcher in the Rye (or Over the Abyss in Rye as the most popular one is titled) and raises all sorts of interesting questions about how to convey American ideas about iconoclasm and conformity—not to mention slang—to Russian readers.

When the people followed the Communists at the beginning of the twentieth century, they gave up Christ, but they found it impossible, as the revolutionary poets exhorted them, “to throw Pushkin overboard the steamboat of modernity.”

Prominent Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin has an essay up at The New Republic, translated from Russian, about the fundamental conflicts between his country’s society, its government, and its literature.

Writer and Rumpus contributor Elliott Holt sits down to discuss her debut novel, You Are One of Them, her preoccupation with secrets, and working in 1990s Moscow during Russia's economic transition. ...more

It tells the story of a team of Russian geologists who went to remote Siberia in 1978 and stumbled upon a family who had been living there for decades in order to escape civilization and practice a religion so fundamentalist that bread was forbidden.

“We couldn’t even imagine that the authorities would be so dumb that they would actually legitimize our influence by arresting us. Sure, Tsentr E tried to intimidate us by tailing us constantly. But unlike Putin, we’re not chickenshit—so we didn’t stop performing.”

Today in a Russian court, three members (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alekhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30) of the all-female Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism.”

(For those unfamiliar with the story, here is a round-up of links that we published last week.)

The trio had been facing up to seven years, but, after much deliberation, was sentenced to two years in prison for an anti-Putin song they performed in a church.

Rejected by the early Soviet state, Sigizmund Krhizhanovsky published only nine stories in his lifetime; luckily his novel The Letter Killers Club is now available in English.

Hello

Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, advice, music, film and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate and true (and sometimes very, very funny).(more)